


To Breathe Again (Impossibilities Remix)

by Unforgotten



Category: X-Men (Original Timeline Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Dark Future/Dark Timeline, M/M, Missing Scenes, POV Second Person, Remix, Reunions, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-19 02:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11303508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: After Liberty Island, you think you must have burned that bridge at last. After Alkali Lake, you're even more certain. What once seemed so easy is now an impossibility, and the dream that once plagued you no longer comes.Then Charles dies and you know: Going home was never truly impossible until now.





	To Breathe Again (Impossibilities Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ikeracity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikeracity/gifts).
  * Inspired by [To Breathe Again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/403551) by [ikeracity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikeracity/pseuds/ikeracity). 



There's a dream you have, from time to time. When you haven't seen him in a while, or when you have but you've quarreled. When he's on your mind despite yourself and you're choosing to ignore him, a silent treatment you're certain would drive him even battier than the helmet does.

Everything's simple in the dream, more than it's ever been in waking life. It's enough that you miss him, enough that you _want_. Nothing else seems to matter there, and so you put the helmet aside, pack a change of clothes in a small briefcase and go. You head to the nearest train station, and somehow there's never a line to buy a ticket, never a wait to board the train. When you reach your destination, you always walk the rest of the way, it never seeming to occur to your dream self to spare your arthritic knees by calling a cab. (But why should it, when the self you are in the dream is always you at thirty, when your body was another weapon, lithe and quick and strong?)

Sometimes, you get within view of the house. Other times, within arms' length of the gate. Either way, though you never quite see him, he's always there, filling your mind with warmth and welcome for your return home...

And before you can enter, before it's finished, you wake up, and spend the next days or weeks furious at your weakness. It's something that can never be denied when it rises up again: How simple, how easy it would be to go back. It's never been that you can't but that you won't.

Still, the older you get, the less often you dream it. The harder it becomes to entertain the thought for even the first few waking moments.

After Liberty Island, you think you must have burned that bridge at last. After Alkali Lake, you're even more certain. What once seemed so easy is now an impossibility, and the dream that once plagued you no longer comes.

Then Charles dies and you know: Going home was never truly impossible until now.

***

You stay in San Francisco for a little over a year. It's not as if you have anywhere else to go, now that you're no better than human. It's not as if the Brotherhood would follow you, if you managed to track them down. If your paths were to cross, you imagine most of them would move to put you out of your misery, as they should—but though there's nothing left of you that matters, you're not ready to die, not yet. You've never been willing to sacrifice yourself for any cause, and certainly not for none.

Most nights, you brood over the news in the papers, on television—everything that's happening, everything you've feared for so long, falling into place now that you're powerless to fight it.

Most days, you play chess in the park with other old men. Human all, as far as you can tell, and so you don't talk politics. You tell yourself they'd hate you if they knew what you are; you tell yourself more firmly every time they're kind about your bereavement. It doesn't occur to you for months that it's astonishing in its own way that not one of them has an unkind word to say for a widower whose partner was a man. (You don't think about what Charles would say, if he knew you were representing him in this way—as if you'd had a life together, rather than parted.)

One day, when none of your chess acquaintences has shown up, you cause a queen to wobble on the board. You glance to one side and then the other, to be certain no one noticed; then you go back to the room you've been renting, and you spend the rest of the day trying for a repeat.

You don't get one, but you wake from the dream the next morning. It's the same as it ever was, but you've never before woken from it weeping, knowing that you have been ever since you boarded the train.

***

In the end, it's just as easy as it ever seemed in the dream. There's more than enough money left in your bank account, the one connected to the name you happened to be carrying identification for when you were stricken. You go to the train station, and if you thought you might still be dreaming, there's a line and the next train for New York won't be departing for hours. You buy a newspaper and read updates on the latest horrors while you wait.

Half an hour later, you see a man and a woman watching you, speaking to one another in low voices. Once, you'd have demanded to know what they thought they were looking at; now, you get out of your seat and head toward the bathroom. You stand inside the door for forty-five seconds, then exit the bathroom again, then duck out into the street. You don't look back to see if they're still watching. You know better than to give anyone else reason to notice you.

Next, the bus station. It's dirtier, more crowded, but no one looks at you twice. The line is short, and you've made it just in time for the New York bus. Ten minutes after you arrive, you're in your seat. A few minutes after that the bus is backing out of its parking spot, and you're on your way.

It's a three day ride, but it goes quickly until midway through the second day, when the bus pulls off the highway, an unexpected stop. For a moment, you think it's broken down—then, coming awake, you see the concrete barriers, the lights. You've come to a checkpoint. You've barely realized this when three men board the bus. For a moment, you're fourteen again, knowing the SS has finally come to the sad little house you share with your parents, to take the three of you away.

They passed that law a mere month after Charles' death, a month after you failed at Alcatraz. They've passed others, over the past year, each more oppressive than the last. Now, it is not only illegal to be mutant without registering with the state; it is illegal to travel across state lines without carrying identification stating the nature of your mutation. Soon, it will be illegal to be mutant in public without identification. Then, it will be illegal for mutants to go to the same schools, the same stores as humans. Before long, being mutant at all will be illegal, but the extermination will of course have begun long before then.

There's a gun in your jacket. You don't reach for it, waiting; perhaps they won't recognize you. Perhaps even if they think they do, the detector wands they carry won't pick up on your mutant DNA. You've been Cured, after all. You can't do anything more than wobble a queen on a chess board.

If they take you, it won't be long before they know who you are. The United States government has had you in their custody often enough to know every identifying mark on your body, from the tattoo on your left arm to the mole on your left ankle. They'll put you in one of their plastic cells. Then, some day not long from now, they'll put you to death, with or without a trial. You've always known you'll die fighting for the cause, but the concept of rotting in a cell in your last days is as bitter as it has ever been.

You reach for the metal of the bus, all around you, and there's nothing, as there's been nothing for the past fourteen months. All is quiet, all is dead. The men continue down the aisle, and when they're a seat in front of you, their wands begin to beep, pulsing a bright, ominous red.

But it's not you they turn to. It's not you they ask for documentation.

You hadn't even noticed the young woman with the toddler in the seat across from you. No: you had, but you'd dismissed them, gone out of your way to pay no attention. Now, the woman fumbles in her bag, presents identification for herself and the child. From your seat across the aisle, you can still see that her driver's license has no red M—but the baby's ID does.

They make the woman stand, far enough away from the child that its reading won't affect hers. You reach into your jacket, your fingers curling around the handle of the pistol. For the woman, the wand goes quiet, goes dark and stays that way. The men allow her to sit back down, then head back to the front of the bus. They exchange words with the driver, who laughs. They go down the stairs, then wave the bus on through.

There's contempt, a sour taste in your mouth: That as a defenseless human, you stayed silent; that your response to danger without your gift is to flee, or to freeze and hope the confrontation doesn't come.

The baby's mother is shaking quite badly. Before, the baby had been in its carseat by the window, but now she leaves it in her lap, holding on tightly.

You recall a time you and Charles were quarreling, something about the way he chose to run his school. He'd been complaining about some student's parents, and you'd said you didn't see why he allowed humans to think they had a say over the safety and education of their mutant children. He'd asked if you seriously thought human parents of mutant children should have their parental rights dissolved, to which you'd said you didn't see why not. Then Charles had brought up your own mother, a nuclear bomb dropped into the middle of what otherwise might have ended up as a tolerable weekend together. You didn't speak to him again for the better part of two years (and wouldn't have then if he hadn't been hospitalized with a particularly nasty case of pneumonia. He was always doing things like that, making you soften because the reason for his hospitalizations nearly always went back to a beach in Cuba, that split second of inattention he says is no one's fault even though it's clear to you that he'll use it against you forever).

Now, you keep an eye on the woman and her child. When she gets up and takes the child with her to the bathroom at the back of the bus a little while later, she's not there for thirty seconds before she returns to her seat. You know why, because you used that bathroom yourself not long after boarding: The floor is much too sticky with filth for her to want to put the baby down for even a short few minutes.

You wait until none of the other passengers seem to be paying attention, and then lean toward her. In your most grandfatherly fashion—you are perfectly capable of looking and sounding like a kind old man, though you largely prefer to come across otherwise—you say, "I can watch him for you, my dear, if you need to use the facilities."

She looks at you quickly, startled, suspicious. She should be, in these dark days. You'd approve, were the sentiment directed at anyone but yourself.

You take a quarter from your pocket, lay it flat on your palm, and then, hidden from the view of the driver and all the passengers in front of or behind you, you will it to rise into the air. You have no reason to suspect it will, especially after your failure to so much as feel the metal all around you—but slowly, shakily, it does rise. Not far, no more than an inch, but it's more than a chess piece wobbling, and it's enough that it can't possibly be a sleight of hand. It's enough to say what you need it to say.

"Okay," says the woman. "If you're sure you don't mind?"

"I wouldn't have offered if I minded," you say, and the next thing you know, there's a baby in your lap. You've not been this close to one since Anya, and you always thought it would be discomforting at the least; but although he's heavier than you expected, he looks nothing at all like your eldest daughter. Perhaps that's why the memory that comes, when you notice the orange tinge of his skin, the brownish markings on the backs of his small hands, is of something else, another person altogether. For a moment, you wish Mystique were here, so you could make a wry remark to her regarding tigers. (Then you're glad she's not, because if anyone else in the Brotherhood would kill you quickly, you're quite certain she would make you suffer, first.)

The baby's mother comes back, hurried footsteps down the aisle. You hand the baby back over, and, a few minutes later, you're surprised when she starts talking to you. About what they've been through, how hard it is. Not because of the baby himself, but because his father took off before his birth, and her parents were willing to have her stay with them until his stripes came, some three weeks after. She's been couch hopping ever since, but that, too, is getting harder—bad enough to try the patience of one's friends in good times, much less when people like your son are vilified in the news on a daily basis.

"Where are you going now?" you ask, although you suspect the answer is nowhere, or that she doesn't know. You knew you'd seen that hopeless, panicked look before; it's no coincidence, after all, that she made you think of your mother.

"Um," she says. "There's this place, I've heard of, in New York?"

She fumbles around in the backpack at her feet, hands you a wrinkled pamphlet. You don't have to read it, you don't even have to see the front page to know where it is she's going, that you're headed to the same place.

"Xavier's," you mutter, and it's not until much later that you realize it's the first time you've said any part of his name out loud since Alcatraz. "I'm headed there myself, believe it or not."

"Really?"

"Yes. To offer them my assistance." It's the first time you've said that out loud, too, and it sounds uniquely ludicrous—that Charles' disciples would have you now that he's gone, that you'd be of any use if they did. You, who could once lay waste to landmarks; now you can't even levitate a pocket knife.

If the baby's mother thinks it's ridiculous, she has the grace not to say so. In the end it's her idea, not yours, to travel the rest of the way more or less together.

***

You don't walk all the way to the house from the bus station. You're seventy-six years old with aching knees; there's two heavy backpacks to carry, not to mention a baby who's been making one scene or another since you left Ohio; you call a cab for the three of you.

You consider having it deposit you slightly down the road, or at the front gate, but it's not as if the whole world doesn't already know about Charles' school, and three days on a bus have left you so weary you simply wish for it to be done. You have the cab drive all the way to the front door. You get out holding a backpack—not yours; you left your briefcase on the bus. There was nothing inside of any importance.

You almost you'll make it inside without challenge, but you turn out to be wrong when a figure steps into your path, blocking the door.

 _Snikt_.

It _would_ be the Wolverine. You never thought he would still be here, but now you are quite certain this is how you will die: the Master of Magnetism, sliced into bits by the man with the metal skeleton. How perfectly ironic.

"What're _you_ doing here?"

"I've come," you say, and you mean to say 'to help' or even 'for sanctuary,' but in your deepest heart you know exactly why and for whom you've come, and it's not him, or any of the rest of them, "for Charles."

He's gone, you know that. You also know how he'd have hated the idea of his work going on without him to stick his nose into every part of it. Perhaps he'd have hated even more the idea of you involving yourself—but then, maybe he'd remember that you were there, too, at the very beginning, when this place was no more than an idea of what a dusty old mansion could become.

The Wolverine doesn't greet this remark with scorn, or mockery. Instead, he says, "Who've you got with you?"

The baby's mother is pale, but she manages to speak up, and if she babbles a little out of terror at being addressed by a man with knives coming out of his knuckles, she gets the gist across.

"Inside," says the Wolverine. "Follow the signs for new arrivals. Can't miss 'em."

Her, he lets through the door. When you make as if to follow, he blocks the door once again. If you had any strength at all, it'd be quite an amusing game, but as it is it's wearing.

"How did you—" he begins, but then another voice comes:

"Logan. Let him in."

Storm sweeps past you, past him, through the door; for a second, she holds it open, clearly waiting. You follow, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a glance back.

You follow her through the halls, past the signs, which are indeed obvious, neither of you speaking. Partly it's that you're not entirely certain she wouldn't strike you with a lightning bolt if you tried, but most of it's a strange feeling that's come upon you. It's as if some part of you knows where you're going. No matter what happens next, you feel as if it won't surprise you, as if it can't. It's as if you're going to find out how the dream ends, the way it was always intended to end.

Perhaps that's why you don't feel any sense of shock when Storm opens another door, and inside it is a room made out like a hospital room, and in the bed by the window is Charles Xavier. He's hooked up to as many wires as you've ever seen him, but he's awake. He's got his reading glasses on, sorting through some stack of papers. When you enter, he looks up, and his jaw drops. He, at least, looks postively gobsmacked.

" _Erik_?" he asks. "What are you—how—you're alive!"

This seems like a backward reaction to you, but at dream's end you can no longer remember quite why.

"Don't tell me you expected me to drown myself in a river just because _you_ weren't," you say, an automatic peevishness you would perhaps not have chosen if you'd thought about it more carefully, but also have no particular urge to walk back.

"Well, come over here! Ororo, if we could have some privacy, please."

"Of course, Professor," and then she's gone, though you'd not have noticed if every enemy you'd ever made were in this room, watching this moment.

Charles gestures toward the chair beside his bed. You do as bidden and sit, never taking your eyes from him. "Charles," you say, and then, "How?" although part of you will always be convinced that Charles is here because you came.

"I have no earthly clue. But how did you hear about it?"

"I didn't."

"But you're here...? I'm missing something. I've only been back for four days, for heaven's sake. You must have heard something."

There's a fluttering inside your head. Weak, brief. Not the warm enveloping you might have expected, but a queen wobbling on a chess board, a quarter levitating less than an inch above your palm.

Afterward, Charles looks no more enlightened as to your motivation. There have been times when that was your intention, but you didn't bring the helmet, wouldn't have even if you'd known, and so you have mercy on him: "I didn't know. I didn't so much as guess."

"Then why are you here?"

"I came to help," you say.

If it sounds ludicrous to Charles, too, he at least has the courtesy not to laugh in your face. In fact, after he's thought about it for a moment, he swallows, his eyes shining.

"And how long will you be staying this time?" he asks. He's asked this of you so many times, always in a deceptively light tone, but there's little of that lightness left this time. He must see them, too, the dark days ahead. He must see it, the war that could be fought not on two fronts but on three: the humans together, while your kind divides itself, half fighting behind you while the other half flocks behind Charles, thus ensuring the destruction of you all.

"I'll be staying," you say, brusquely. You no longer know any other way to say it than to throw the gauntlet down at his feet and dare him to claim otherwise.

There's a pause in the room, such quiet as has rarely been between you; you're holding your breath, and as Charles searches your face you're quite certain he's not breathing, either.

"You think it's that easy?" he asks, and you're suddenly certain of something you never guessed before: Charles knows about the dreams. Maybe he's always known, no matter how deeply you buried them from the very beginning. "After all this time? After everything you've done?"

You reach for him, taking care not to jostle the wires, or the needle taped onto the back of his hand. You wind your fingers together. You're beginning to wake up, to truly realize that Charles is here. That you're here with him. That in this much, at least, you have another chance.

And it's so easy, it's the easiest thing in the world. It's like breathing; being with him always has been, something you default to unless you consciously choose otherwise.

There are hard things coming, things you can't even imagine in this moment, even if you think you comprehend the shape of them. A year from now, you'll hear of Sentinels for the first time; three years from now, you'll flee with Charles in the Blackbird, with the cold knowledge that you're both as helpless at full strength against them as you would have been if they'd come today. Seven years from now, you, who've never even once been willing to sacrifice yourself, for any cause or for none...you'll do just that to buy time. You'll die holding Charles' hand as the horrors come for you, never knowing, never being certain you succeeded. And if it'll be hard, it'll also be as easy as this, and as inevitable.

"As if you don't," you say. "As if you wouldn't have me."

And this is how the old dream ends, how the new one begins: Charles smiles at you, and says, "Welcome home."


End file.
